Businesses
Fees for finding beneficial owners of private companies at Sh600
Tuesday January 9, 2024
Director General of the Business Registration Service, Kenneth Gathuma. FILE PHOTO | SALATON NJAU | NMG
Kenyans will pay 600 shillings to track down the beneficial owners of private companies in the government’s latest effort to increase revenue collection in a process that could reveal entrepreneurs’ wealth and stakes in their businesses.
Through legal notice, the fees were introduced by Attorney General Justin Muturi in October last year by amending the Companies (Beneficial Ownership Information) Regulations 2020.
“The Second Schedule of the Principal Regulations is amended by inserting the following new fees: Beneficial Ownership Search Application Sh600,” Mr Muturi said in the latest notice.
The main regulations, gazetted by former Attorney General Kihara Kariuki in February 2020, only provided for a fee of Sh500 for a notice of cessation of beneficial ownership.
Business Registration Service (BRS) director general Kenneth Gathuma could not be reached for comment on Monday, but the new taxes signal a state plan to make beneficial ownership information available to the audience.
Indeed, the 2020 regulations stipulate that information on beneficial owners is not publicly available, but opening the portal could provide the state with a new source of revenue from those seeking to know the investors behind specific companies.
Read: Half of private companies do not disclose their ownership
This comes three years after former President Uhuru Kenyatta’s regime gave all companies a six-month deadline from January 2021 to July 2021 to reveal their beneficial owners. The push for disclosure of beneficial owners came after the state, through the Business Registration Service (BRS), operationalized the electronic register of beneficial owners in October 2020, in accordance with the law on companies in 2015.
A beneficial owner of a company is described as an individual who controls an express trust or on whose behalf an undertaking takes place.
Beneficial owners are required to provide their personal information including name, national identity number, Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) PIN, telephone number, occupation and home address.
Read: Companies hiding their true owners will be removed from the company register
Despite the threat of fines of up to Sh500,000 for failure to register their beneficial owners, progress on the registration programme, undertaken by BRS, has been slow.
The agency’s data shows that only 43.05 percent of private companies had declared their corporate status as of the end of June 2023.
